Protection against infectious agents is important in the dental industry. Dental care providers strive to protect themselves and their patients from possible contamination. To help provide protection against contamination, dental care providers use disposable gloves which they typically change, at a minimum, after use with each patient. However, gloves can fail as a protective device because the instrument used by the wearer is not protected from contamination. In other words, after an infectious agent from one patient contaminates an instrument, the dental care provider can contact the agent on the instrument and then spread the agent to the next patient. Therefore, unless the instrument is replaced or sterilized between each patient, the dental care provider can spread the contamination on the instrument to subsequent patients. Replacing the instrument parts which are vulnerable to contamination is prohibitively expensive. Sterilizing the parts by autoclaving is time consuming. Sterilizing the parts by spraying with disinfectant is inadequate to effectively remove all contaminants.
The prior art discloses protective plastic sheaths for covering hand held dental tools. For example, U.S. Pat. No. 4,810,194, issued to Snedden, discloses a plastic sheath for protecting an evacuator or suction device. The plastic sheath is attached to an adaptor which connects a disposable evacuator tube to the valve body. This device requires assembly before use, first to attach the adaptor to the valve and then to attach the disposable evacuator tube to the adaptor. Such assembly takes time and also introduces risk of contamination, in that there is handling of the evacuator tube during assembly and also there is the risk that the evacuator tube will be reused. Other prior art patents also disclose sheaths for use in protecting dental tools wherein at least a portion of the tool is covered with a plastic sleeve. See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 2,073,137, issued to Bimrose, U.S. Pat. No. 4,266,935, issued to Hoppe, and U.S. Pat. No. 4,907,968, issued to Eisner and Becker. None of these prior art patents teaches a disposable protective barrier that can be assembled on the device in one simple step and that is completely disposable.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide an inexpensive, time-efficient, and effective protective barrier for a dental instrument that will protect against the transfer of contaminants from one dental patient to another dental patient.
It is also an object of the present invention to provide an inexpensive, time-efficient, and effective method to protect against the transfer of contaminants from one dental patient to another dental patient via a dental instrument.